OK, this is picking up from Channeling and GNS at Ron's request.  I'd like to discuss the overlap of conflicts -- having GNS Nar/Sim conflict within a game as well as channeling-vs-drama conflict. 

Now, accepted wisdom previously has been that channeling/immersion is not a signal for GNS Simulationism.  For example, Vincent had his thread on Sacrificing Character Integrity - a Rant -- although there were some like Ralph who disagreed with him.  I also discussed being true to character in a thread I labelled Anti-my-guy Syndrome. 

So I'd like to bring up my own experiences with such overlaps, and I'd also like to query other people's experiences.  Has anyone seen a correlation between GNS Nar/Sim and channeling-vs-drama? 

--------------------

I'd like to go over another example of channeling-vs-drama clash, which happened in the "Immortal Tales" campaign, which I played jointly with Chris Lehrich, Mark Kobrak, and David Covin.  The campaign was nominally using Theatrix, but largely systemless.  The characters were all immortal beings of different sorts in something close to the real world.  Each session was set at a different time in history between 1100 A.D. and the present.  The campaign had a unifying wrap-around story:  The four immortals had met in the house of Odysseus (a PC) in 1994.  There they exchanged stories about their past.  So each session was an episode where one PC was absent -- and that character's player acts as GM while the who the other PCs tell the story to his character.

I have some more details, in particular on the PCs on my web page, Immortal Tales.  My PC was Harkel, a Norse man with a Dragon inside him, who could be an unpleasant sort. 

So in one episode, Chris was acting as GM.  The adventure was set in Gahara, India in 1844.  We had run afoul of some members of the Ismaili cult.  We had started to see some signs going on when Pyutz was captured.  Harkel and Lemminkainen found tracks leading away, and he had written a symbol for "trap" in the ground along the way. 

At this point, I as Harkel balked at going to the rescue.  From his point of view, Pyutz was tougher than either him or Lemminkainen, and these people had taken him out.  I said that he wanted instead to threaten them remotely.  I couldn't see him being willing to go be a hero in that manner. 

However, this caused quite a conflict between me, Chris as GM, and Lemminkainen's player David.  In-game, what happened was that Lemminkainen tried to rescue him on his own shapeshifted, but failed.  Harkel started a fire among the cult, but then I eventually compromised to a degree as Chris had a bunch of guys who were friends of Pyutz head out to go rescue him.  Still, at the end, I think Chris, David, and Mark were all annoyed at me to varying degrees. 

--------------------

Maybe Chris would disagree with me, but I believe this was a Creative Agenda clash.  The others wanted there to be a fixed Theme, but I wanted to answer the question differently.  In other words, I was Narrativist clashing with GNS Simulationist path for story. 

For me, this has been a fairly common pattern.  I generally push to follow the character wherever it leads.  However, I know that experiences differ.  How does this compare to other people's experiences of similar clashes? 

Abandon what you figure your character would do in order to make the character do what the other players at the table want him to do?

While you certainly were 'channeling' in that you wanted to remain true to what you supposed your character would do, I don't know if the other players were really after 'drama' in such a way that was antithetical to your approach.  As I see it, they were not after a dramatic scene and you weren't so much as they were after a different kind of dramatic scene than you were.  The entire party could have stayed put and talked about courage and cowardice and honor and friendship and whatever, and you still could have generated a dramatic situation.  The badguys could have come to you instead of the other way around and created a dramatic situation.  That the other players wanted to go to them and create that dramatic situation does not to me suggest that they were 'going for theme' while you were 'going for character'.  After all, it's perfectly feasible that it was in-line with their character concepts to go and be heroic, and they were channeling just as much as you were.  It's just that their particular character-agendas and their particular player-preferences were different than yours.

If anything, I'd say the real problem was the other players invalidating your channeling since it was immaterial to their goals.  From my (brief and uninformed) reading, much of the situation could have been resolved by Lemminkainen's player (not character) giving you some screen time and perhaps interaction with his character in order to address the differences in character viewpoints, rather than skipping ahead to the infiltration/battle scene.  Of course, this is the 'problem' with channeling, that the player can get so involved with the character that they do not step back and address the social inter-player issues at the table.  Lemminkainen's player may have been just as eager to get to the battle as Lemminkainen was, when he could have reduced the inter-player tension by letting that scene happen a little later in order to allow you some space.

To illustrate from my own experiences, of which I know the details far better, in our Riverworld campaign, my wife was playing a stubborn turn-of-the-century frontierswoman (whose name I forget) while my brother was playing Teddy Roosevelt.  We were playing in GURPS; the fronteirswoman had the Stubborn disadvantage and Teddy had the Glory Hound disadvantage, which my brother played to the hilt.  However, the mistake that my brother made was that, in addition to playing his character as a my-way-or-the-highway Glory Hound in Teddy's interactions with other characters in the game (which would be fine), he also let that "bleed over" and interacted with his fellow players in a similar manner (which was not).  My wife tried to play her character and remain true to her nature, but allowed for inter-player discussion and negotiation in terms of scene framing and pacing -- which only works if the other players are willing to allow for that, as well.  My brother ended up taking advantage of the concessions my wife put forward, rather heedlessly taking any advantage he could in order to forward his character's agenda.  My wife concluded more than once that her character was not important to the game, and all she was supposed to do was follow along and hit people in combat.

Channeling and immersion are great, but conflicts between channeled characters are inevitable, and you must have some way of ensuring that conflicts between characters do not become conflicts between players.  Systemic support for this has been lacking in most published gamebooks.  Any game that assumes both (a) players will channel/immerse/stay true to their characters and (b) characters will work together seamlessly is making an incorrect and rather common assumption.  Note that by no means am I saying that there needs to be ways to make the characters agree in-game -- I think Capes does an awesome job of bringing such inter-character conflicts to the fore and making them the focus of the game.  Similarly, any group of Dogs is just a timebomb waiting for inter-Dog conflict, and the system makes that conflict exactly the same as the rest of the game -- a matter of taking moral stances.  Moreover, Dog's system allows for that conflict to take place, get resolved, and then keep going with more juicy moral goodness (flavored by that inter-player conflict).

In the end, I don't see this as a conflict between the channeling technique and any specific agenda so much as a conflict between player goals.  Moreover, this difference in goals only becomes a conflict when players try to make their goals the exclusive focus of play for the whole table.  The conflict can be avoided with a little more foresight, cooperation, and negotiation.  (If you think such meta-concerns are antithetical to channeling in general, well, that's a different subject entirely, and my prognosis is that you're SoL.)

John,

I suspect that Channeling is more prone to clash than most techniques. Since clash essentially happens when the shared content of play cannot be made to meet everyone's goals, Channeling a character is a very definite goal which is very difficult to share in terms of resulting play. In more precise terms, the Channeling view of a single character is very unlikely for multiple players to adopt. What then matters is what additional goals are brought into play. Either the Channeler needs additional goals to accept when the Channeling goal won't be met (i.e. when changing a Channeled action) or the other players must adopt goals which permit them to include some portion of that view.

This is of course assuming the simplest therapeutic view point, namely that shared goals in terms of play content leads to a successful game. More complex approaches could be taken where the intersection of player views is empty (e.g. when all but one player is Channeling, and that last player is competitively learning the procedure for causing multiple Channelers to feed of each other's decisions (and has some skill in this).) Usually in this case one or more players bridge the different views, even though no single view need contain portions from all other views.

The most reasonable approximation of narrativism in terms of general play content is that of a cultural content, focused on moral and ethical decisions. In that context I would expect to see overt awareness of other player's moral or ethical stances. You didn't include any content like that, so I suspect that's not something you retained strongly from the session. From that alone I would deduce that it is unlikely that you were playing from a cultural perspective, and it is likely that your predominant view was declarative with a topic matter of your character. As a perhaps inaccurate simplification, you appear most interested in what your character would do next, rather than why he would and why the other characters would or would not.

It is important to remember that clash can occur within CAs, as well as between them.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Joshua wrote:
In the end, I don't see this as a conflict between the channeling technique and any specific agenda so much as a conflict between player goals.  Moreover, this difference in goals only becomes a conflict when players try to make their goals the exclusive focus of play for the whole table.  The conflict can be avoided with a little more foresight, cooperation, and negotiation.  (If you think such meta-concerns are antithetical to channeling in general, well, that's a different subject entirely, and my prognosis is that you're SoL.)

Joshua wrote:
To illustrate from my own experiences, of which I know the details far better, in our Riverworld campaign, my wife was playing a stubborn turn-of-the-century frontierswoman (whose name I forget) while my brother was playing Teddy Roosevelt.  We were playing in GURPS; the fronteirswoman had the Stubborn disadvantage and Teddy had the Glory Hound disadvantage, which my brother played to the hilt.  However, the mistake that my brother made was that, in addition to playing his character as a my-way-or-the-highway Glory Hound in Teddy's interactions with other characters in the game (which would be fine), he also let that "bleed over" and interacted with his fellow players in a similar manner (which was not).  My wife tried to play her character and remain true to her nature, but allowed for inter-player discussion and negotiation in terms of scene framing and pacing -- which only works if the other players are willing to allow for that, as well.  My brother ended up taking advantage of the concessions my wife put forward, rather heedlessly taking any advantage he could in order to forward his character's agenda.  My wife concluded more than once that her character was not important to the game, and all she was supposed to do was follow along and hit people in combat.

Channeling and immersion are great, but conflicts between channeled characters are inevitable, and you must have some way of ensuring that conflicts between characters do not become conflicts between players. 

Joshua wrote:
Systemic support for this has been lacking in most published gamebooks.  Any game that assumes both (a) players will channel/immerse/stay true to their characters and (b) characters will work together seamlessly is making an incorrect and rather common assumption.

Joshua wrote:
From my (brief and uninformed) reading, much of the situation could have been resolved by Lemminkainen's player (not character) giving you some screen time and perhaps interaction with his character in order to address the differences in character viewpoints, rather than skipping ahead to the infiltration/battle scene.  Of course, this is the 'problem' with channeling, that the player can get so involved with the character that they do not step back and address the social inter-player issues at the table.  Lemminkainen's player may have been just as eager to get to the battle as Lemminkainen was, when he could have reduced the inter-player tension by letting that scene happen a little later in order to allow you some space.

John wrote: I'm curious what sort of concessions your wife offered, and how your brother heedlessly took advantage of them.  Were they clearly out-of-character concessions?

Joshua wrote:

John wrote: I'm curious what sort of concessions your wife offered, and how your brother heedlessly took advantage of them.  Were they clearly out-of-character concessions?

I can't recall them in detail, but they were framed in "We can have the characters do this instead" terms, rather than "We can do this instead" terms, so I'd say rather OOC.  They were also offered after game-time narrative was very explicitly stopped and discussion was purely player-to-player around the table.  My brother would agree with the concessions, have the character do the proposed  course of action, and then turn the results towards the goal he wanted in the first place.  He rather patently did not recognize anyone else's claim to screen time or story-significance, or thought that they had to "fight" for it just as he was in order to deserve it. 

Joshua wrote:
You say that your compromise "seriously undercut what we were playing for" but you also seem to think that different players were playing for different things from the start (unless I'm reading this wrong).  How did a scene involving Harkel doing his own thing undercut what Lemmensomethinorother's player was after?

John wrote: So as I understand it, he was technically abiding by the OOC agreements, but was still managing to hog the spotlight time.  Is that a fair description?  That does sound like a problem, but I'm not sure how it connects to channeling.  If he was ignoring the OOC agreements in play, then I could see the relation -- but this seems more like a general case of spotlight hogging.  For example, I have often heard the opposite complaint that channeling players are passive wallflowers who don't engage with situation.

John, I'd like to skip back to an earlier post in this thread.

Wormwood wrote: [...]I would deduce that it is unlikely that you were playing from a cultural perspective, and it is likely that your predominant view was declarative with a topic matter of your character. As a perhaps inaccurate simplification, you appear most interested in what your character would do next, rather than why he would and why the other characters would or would not.

It is important to remember that clash can occur within CAs, as well as between them.

John wrote:
Maybe Chris would disagree with me, but I believe this was a Creative Agenda clash.  The others wanted there to be a fixed Theme, but I wanted to answer the question differently.  In other words, I was Narrativist clashing with GNS Simulationist path for story. 

For me, this has been a fairly common pattern.  I generally push to follow the character wherever it leads.  However, I know that experiences differ.  How does this compare to other people's experiences of similar clashes? 

Marco wrote:
I have often questioned how one knows that CA-Clashes are more meaningful or relevant to satisfying gaming than technique clashes.

OK, this is curious.  So Elliot suggests that this is an intra-Simulationist clash -- while Marco suggests that this is an intra-Narrativist clash.  I suspect all three of these (i.e. my seeing N-vs-S, Elliot seeing S-vs-S, Marco seeing N-vs-N) probably say something about our perspectives.  I pondered this issue on my LiveJournal a few weeks ago in a post entitled Me and GNS. 

ewilen wrote:
John, the first question in my mind is, If you were trying to play Nar, what was the Premise? And did you, as a player, connect with that Premise on some level?

It seems to me that you're saying you were grabbing for Nar purely because you refused to be Forced by the other players, and they were going for Sim because they were trying to use Force on you. But while Force is considered antithetical to Nar, I don't know if it's definitional of Sim. The glossary defines Force as "control over characters' thematically-significant decisions", but I believe I've seen that glossed as "control over characters' CA-relevant decisions". If that gloss is accepted, then this conflict could be seen as intra-Sim. You were going for Sim(Exploration of Character) and the other players were going for Sim(Exploration of Situation).

Marco wrote:
I have to say that I don't necessiarily see N vs. S there. I'm not sure that the other players, by thinking it would be cool to mount a rescue, would be in some way anti-Nar: it would simply be their answer to the premise question (whatever that question was).

Nowhere is it written that I, as a player, will enjoy gaming with someone else's solution to a problem simply because it is an address of Premise. If one player's addressing premise leads to unsatisfying play (as deemed by the other players) it is simply an intra-Nar clash. I have often questioned how one knows that CA-Clashes are more meaningful or relevant to satisfying gaming than technique clashes.

Okay, so to put it crudely, Harkel was facing the question "Is it worth it to form attachments to people?", you yourself perceived this as an interesting question for him to face, and you felt the answer would provide functional play either way. Sounds like you were grabbing for Nar; I retract my earlier suspicion. (The summary in your initial post sounded more like a tactical disagreement, or an analytical disagreement over characterization, than a moral issue.)

It looks like other players wanted a specific scenario to develop so they blocked your choice. They weren't interested in the moral question, so they weren't grabbing for Nar at that moment. If what they wanted to do was "play out a dramatic rescue" then I'd still guess that in GNS terms they were trying for Sim(exploration of situation).

I'm satisfied that channeling per se doesn't conflict with Nar per se. I think we still might reasonably ask if channeling can contribute to clashes either among channelers or between channelers and non-channelers at the player level (inter-character conflict can be perfectly functional, as you say).

Also, if we agree that channeling all by itself neither facilitates nor prevents a particular CA-focus, some people's experiences of overreliance on channeling without concern for focusing techniques could explain why channeling sometimes gets blamed for incoherence.

John wrote:
Well, hold on.  Your first statement is misleading.  The fact that David wanted Lemminkainen to mount a rescue is irrelevant.  I had no problem with his character attempting to mount a rescue.  The problem was that David objected to my answer.  The key is your latter point, which I disagree with.  Narrativism inherently requires the participants to be open to any answer to the Premise.  If the GM (or any other player) objects and blocks based on what my answer to the Premise is, then Narrativism itself is being blocked. 

Marco wrote:
If there wasn't actual force then I don't think it's fair to say that your answer was blocked. I mean, people calling a time-out to the game to talk about things or even leaving the table is not the same as blocking your answer, IMO. Certainly people being annoyed by your answer or the GM scrambling to come up with something to keep everyone from having a bad time are possible occurrences under any CA.

Furthermore I can't see playing in a game where I would be expected to withhold objection to a variety of "letigimate" answers to a premise-question: assuming my objection doesn't take the form of force, a convention that I not-object would, in and of itself, block me (that is, assuming the convention rendered my PC effectively an NPC for purposes of taking objecting actions or stances).

Marco wrote:
I mean, people calling a time-out to the game to talk about things or even leaving the table is not the same as blocking your answer, IMO. Certainly people being annoyed by your answer or the GM scrambling to come up with something to keep everyone from having a bad time are possible occurrences under any CA.

Furthermore I can't see playing in a game where I would be expected to withhold objection to a variety of "letigimate" answers to a premise-question: assuming my objection doesn't take the form of force, a convention that I not-object would, in and of itself, block me (that is, assuming the convention rendered my PC effectively an NPC for purposes of taking objecting actions or stances).

Mark wrote:
Which is why I think channeling is problematic for coherent play. There is less bandwidth for clear communication of "hey, I'm going somewhere with this, this matters to me-the-player" without breaking the fiction. Channeling doesn't only require that I individually have a solid grip on my character and have carefully loaded that character with Agenda-relevant ammo - it also requires that all my fellow players know how not to step on my toes, AND that Not-Stepping-On-My-Toes isn't stepping on their toes. All while immersed in the mindset of a character who has a whole different set of priorities.

It's not impossible to keep play firing on all cylinders consistently under those constraints, but it IS delicate and tricky.

John wrote:
Hold on.  I consider that leaving the table or threatening to leave the table is most certainly Force.  I'm not saying that threatening to leave the table can't occur over other, non-GNS differences -- but I don't see a conceptual difference between the GM saying "You have to do X" and a GM saying "If you don't do X, then I walk".  In this case, that's effectively what this came down to.  Play ground to a halt, and the only way that we were able to proceed was by an out-of-character compromise. 

I don't see how a non-objecting convention could possibly render your PC effectively an NPC.  The convention is that you as a player don't try to stop the game over this.  There is nothing preventing your PC from taking action, which isn't the same thing. 

Marco wrote:
Firstly, in the extreme case (but one, I will note, has happenend in Actual Play) if player-A is downright morally offended by player-B's answer to the premise question I don't think it's anti-Nar (and therfore Force) to say "Woah. No. We're not going there--or at least I'm not!"). This is a more extreme case than yours but I think it's relevant. I don't think it's a reasonable expectation for anyone to be "open to any answer to the premise question a person might come up with--to the extent that they are obligated to continue play if the game ceases to be fun."

Marco wrote:
However, in cases where I relate to the other players, I have simply been disappointed by someone's course of action. I want high-energy action--they want cautious pragmatism. Neither of these concerns exist on the CA level (nor do even more basic wants such as party cohesion or a game infused with a sense of heroism). If Chris had said "Look, John, this isn't how my story is supposed to go" or David had said "John, clearly we're supposed to go on the rescue--what's wrong with you?" then I think I'd be swayed. An appeal to a pre-generated story with required courses of action sounds like Sim to me.

But if it's just a general sense of "man, we can't get a good satisfying dynamic going here" then I don't think it can be easily categorized as a CA-level conflict.

John wrote:
Obviously, people should do whatever they are comfortable with and find fun.  However, there is also no requirement that whatever the players find fun has to be Narrativism.  If the players don't enjoy addressing Premise, then they shouldn't do it.  But failing to address Premise or blocking other players' address of Premise means that the game is not Narrativist.  For example, suppose we're playing a game of Little Fears, and the way the story is going touches off a nerve of one player about his real-life family history.  He asks that we calls off the game and wrap it up in an abstract, non-emotionally-intense way which avoids the touchy issues that the game had been hitting.  That's absolutely the right choice.  However, it also wasn't Narrativist. 

Narrativism inherently requires that you be open to whatever answer to Premise the players have.  You can set limits on this -- but the more limits you set on what answers are acceptable, the more you are interfering with Narrativism. 

Marco wrote:
I certainly couldn't quote exact words of the discussion after many years, but my opinion is that it was an appeal to pre-generated story/theme.  That's why I suggested that it was Nar-vs-Sim.  Specifically, it was not an appeal to, say, heroic action.  In other episodes, it was perfectly fine for Harkel to act like an unheroic jerk if that is what the plot called for.  But here, the feeling I got was that I was in trouble because I was messing up the prepared story. 

Marco wrote:

John wrote:
For example, suppose we're playing a game of Little Fears, and the way the story is going touches off a nerve of one player about his real-life family history.  He asks that we calls off the game and wrap it up in an abstract, non-emotionally-intense way which avoids the touchy issues that the game had been hitting.  That's absolutely the right choice.  However, it also wasn't Narrativist. 

Well, the play isn't *any* CA since the game stops (or effectively stops) once the hot-button has been pressed. That same limit exists for Sim or Gamism too. More prosaically, any game I play will have a built-in threshold wherein if the other players don't hold my interest for a long enough time I'm going to quit.

This doesn't make me "anti-CA" it just makes me anti-boredom. I don't see how Nar is inherently any freer in that regard. If the issue is Player-A not being engaged by Player-B's play then it seems a flat issue across CA and every technique, for that matter.

Marco wrote:

John wrote:
I certainly couldn't quote exact words of the discussion after many years, but my opinion is that it was an appeal to pre-generated story/theme.  That's why I suggested that it was Nar-vs-Sim.  Specifically, it was not an appeal to, say, heroic action.  In other episodes, it was perfectly fine for Harkel to act like an unheroic jerk if that is what the plot called for.  But here, the feeling I got was that I was in trouble because I was messing up the prepared story. 

Okay--this I can buy. I'd just used heroism as a generic example but if the issue was prepared-story vs. enjoyable-story then, yeah, Sim (I think it definitonally has to be). But a simple "desire for story" or a "desire for entertaining story" or even "desire to keep playing in a domain where the GM is able to function" is not the same thing as "requirement for prepared story."

When I (and this is a rare occassion, unfortunately) have played with an inexperienced GM, I have usually done what I can to facilitate them within my own comfort zone. This means that I'll usually check with them prior to taking actions I think might surprise them.

The reason for this is straightforward: no matter how committed a traditional GM is to *any* CA there (and this echoes my point above) is usually a limit on what they are able to process.

I can buy the above. I agree that I don't see a real connection between drama/channeling and Nar/Sim. I think the mass of annecdotal evidence is more related to technique-level problems where immersion (to a lot of people) looks like Sim (Jay, IMO). Whether there's a real corelation of not statistically is really hard to know since that kind of data, so far as I know, doesn't exist.

-Marco

Well, no, no hard data exists. But I'd say that a correlation exists, if I had to guess. Though I'd also say that it's probably mostly just traditional. That is, I don't think there's an

a priori

Mike wrote:
Well, no, no hard data exists. But I'd say that a correlation exists, if I had to guess. Though I'd also say that it's probably mostly just traditional. That is, I don't think there's an a priori reason for the correllation, just how people have played in the past for the most part.

The corellation is that players who want channeling also seem to want simulationism. My experience with this stems from, first, my own play goals with these things matching - I played very sim for decades, and channeling was often the sumum bonum of play for me. Second, lots convention play with other folks. Third, lots of annecdotal evidence here. People who self-identify as channelers or "immersionists" also almost always identify with simulationism.

Note that I met few narrativism people, and tried to stay away from the gamism people. So I could probably correlate a lot more activities with sim, too, and it might just be a lack of a good sample of other players (channeling could correlate to all RPG play, actually). But from what I've seen of gamism players, especially, channeling does not strongly correlate. That's not to say that all gamists play pawn stance. But some do, and those who don't chide people who channel as "method-actors" and such. Not all, but large numbers from what I've seen. Most of my experience with narrativism has been, of course, through The Forge, and here there's a bias against channeling. So, again, I see strong anti-correlation there. But, again, I think that's just cultural.

Mike

Well, with due recognition of the cargo cult and ther lack of hard data, I agree with Mikes point - I too think there is a correlation, but not a direct or fixed one.  I have experienced channeling/immersion, but it was not the primary point of play - it helps to understand that I used to play a sort of crypto-Gamist sim.

I don't think a CA preference other than sim rules out channeling.  But certainly, I think, the people for whom channeling is the main point of interest are likely to exhibit sim preferences elsewhere.

Mike wrote:
The corellation is that players who want channeling also seem to want simulationism. My experience with this stems from, first, my own play goals with these things matching - I played very sim for decades, and channeling was often the sumum bonum of play for me. Second, lots convention play with other folks. Third, lots of annecdotal evidence here. People who self-identify as channelers or "immersionists" also almost always identify with simulationism.

Note that I met few narrativism people, and tried to stay away from the gamism people. So I could probably correlate a lot more activities with sim, too, and it might just be a lack of a good sample of other players (channeling could correlate to all RPG play, actually).

Mike wrote:
Most of my experience with narrativism has been, of course, through The Forge, and here there's a bias against channeling. So, again, I see strong anti-correlation there. But, again, I think that's just cultural.

I think the visible connection has to do with people identifying (mis-identifying?) Channeling or Immersion as Sim. That is: most of the conversation I have seen surrounding it conflates the two (Jay). Secondly: it may be very hard to judge a player's preferred CA if they're immersive (I've seen that suggested and can believe it).

-Marco

Marco wrote:
I think the visible connection has to do with people identifying (mis-identifying?) Channeling or Immersion as Sim. That is: most of the conversation I have seen surrounding it conflates the two (Jay). Secondly: it may be very hard to judge a player's preferred CA if they're immersive (I've seen that suggested and can believe it).

John wrote:
The only way to diagnose CA is by what they actually do, not by what they say.